• 3:26 AM
  Duh oriented programming

My online journal is like an extremely awful book in which all the action happens in the space between chapters, and all the written text is about the periods when the characters are sitting around doing nothing, recovering from an interesting part, or awake at 4 in the morning and can't sleep. Nothing interesting actually happens during the chapter. It's mostly just the protagonist sitting around mumbling about all the stuff that happened in the half blank page between chapter 6 and 7.

See, that's what happens when the guy in the book is the one writing the book. You have to be a very motivated journal writer to keep it up when stuff that is worth writing about is going on. "Dear diary: at the moment I am on stage at the showbox. I am trying to play this song in a more improvised style than typical for electronic bands, because I feel that dynamic reaction to the situation at the venue is vital to the impact of live music, and relying solely on sequence playback gives the show a stale quality. Oops, be right back, the verse lyric is coming up and I can't sing and type at the same time."

So after an actual gig, for instance, I'd be too wiped out to do much of anything other than sit in a booth at Charlie's, chin resting in my eggs benedict. Not that I'm playing gigs these days, though I anticipate them happening in the later summer. Mostly I work until I can't stand computers anymore, then I record music until I can't stand computers anymore, then I program utilities or graphic effects or some kind of flash thing until I can't stand computers anymore.

So, then, the medium becomes discouraging. I spend so much time writing programs or music on this guy here that it irks me to be spending writing time on something as banal as text. I've got two programming projects in the pipeline here at home: the ear training game, and the dirt-simulation game. Both somewhat functional, I'll post them here when done. But you have to be sort of interested in the same things as me for them to be much fun.

At work I've been spending my time writing code which handles money. This code will be heavily audited, due to a new law which says the financial officers of a company are personally liable for any financial misdeeds. For my part, I'm trying to design software which will maintain a consistent state of commerce despite a sudden power-down (or other failure) at any point in execution. We'd REALLY like to pretend that more than one thing can happen at exactly the same instant. It's not possible, of course. Even a single pin on a chip changing state from low to high voltage takes a finite amount of time. It is an interesting problem. Maybe not interesting enough to write about endlessly, though.